Posts tagged “Oculus”

Over four years in the making, ZeniMax Media's legal rumble with Oculus and Facebook over Oculus Rift VR cybergoggles has finally ended in a settlement. They had gone through the courts, where a jury initially ruled that Facebook owed ZeniMax $500 million dollars, then a judge later reduced that, and the bickering continued. Their related battle with John Carmack ended in October, and now the…

VR cybergoggles maker Oculus have insisted they're still making a next generation Rift headset despite another key departure from the company. Brendan Iribe, the co-founder and former CEO of Oculus, is the latest person to have upped sticks from parent company Facebook following some internal restructuring of their VR division last week, according to a new report from TechCrunch, and was, until yesterday, meant to…

Oculus announced a brand new set of wireless VR goggles last night, this time in the form of the Oculus Quest. Before you start thinking, 'Hang on a sec, this is just another one of those Oculus Go mobile-type gubbins, isn't it?', bear with me. For unlike the Oculus Go, the Oculus Quest offers the same hand-tracking Touch controllers you get with the Oculus Rift…

Just a couple of weeks ago HTC was confidently rebutting claims about VR dying a huge and monstrous death with record sales of their Vive headset. Now, in a rather more desperate-seeming move, they've announced their Viveport subscription service will shortly be available on arch-rival headset, the Oculus Rift. Who's winning the race for total VR domination? You decide!

Bad news for Rift owners still running Windows 7 or Windows 8 PCs this morning, as Oculus have announced they've updated the minimum OS spec requirement for their Rift VR goggles to Windows 10. That doesn't mean your VR headset will suddenly stop working with your Windows 7/8 PC, of course - it's just that you'll probably miss out on all of Oculus' new-fangled gubbins further down the…

This week, Robot Invader released the sequel to Dead Secret, which was one of the first VR horror-mystery titles I ever got to experience. I enjoyed that game's puzzles and general otherworldy vibe -- not to mention its Kansas based setting. (That's where I'm from. There's a lot of murders there. It felt good to solve one.) Dead Secret Circle builds on the successes of…

Update: this is now fixed, though users will need to take a long route to the update. Oculus officially confirmed that the problem was an expired software certificate, which caused further problems because it also wonked the usual updater. I keep telling you: if you want to jam with the console cowboys in cyberspace, you've gotta roll your own goggs. These megacorp-supplied cybergoggles are controlled…

If you saw our heads-up about the HTC Vive Black Friday deal earlier this week (to recap, you get a Vive, Fallout 4 VR, Doom VFR and a free deluxe audio strap and more for £599 starting from tomorrow), then you'll be pleased to know that the Oculus Rift is also being discounted for Black Friday - starting TODAY, in fact. It's almost as if…

One of those newfangled windows into cyberspace just got a bit cheaper, with the Oculus Rift (bundled with its motion controllers) now priced at £399/$399. That's down from the previous $499 price point, and effectively makes the summer sale a permanent deal. They've also announced the Oculus Go, a self-contained VR headset.

Facebook is planning to unveil a $200 (£150-odd) wireless Oculus VR headset later this year that you can use without connecting to either a PC or a phone, according to a Bloomberg report. The new headset, codename "Pacific", will be a fully standalone product. So you'll be able to take it out of the box, strap it on your head, and start playing games and…

No-one's coming out clean from the ongoing mud brawl between Bethesda owners Zenimax and Facebook subsidiary Oculus. After a court case in which the former alleged that the latter swiped trade secrets from them in order to create the Oculus Rift, Oculus ended up being told to fork out $500m for NDA breach. There's also been an attempt to get the Rift pulled from sale,…

Following a partial victory (and partial defeat) in their legal battle with Oculus over cybergoggles, ZeniMax are trying to shut down a load of Oculus's software. ZeniMax are owed $500 million in total over Oculus breaking an non-disclosure agreement which gave them insight into John Carmack and ZeniMax's work on VR, and are now seeking an injunction to shut down anything that benefitted from that…

A US court has ruled that Oculus must pay $500 million to software developers ZeniMax over the VR headset they’ve developed. The jury ruled that Palmer Luckey, who co-founded Oculus, failed to abide by a non-disclosure agreement he had signed while working with ZeniMax and id Software. However, the jury also found that neither Oculus nor its founders stole trade secrets. This is all part…

There’s a famous scene in Aliens where Ripley and the company men watch as the marines make their way through a derelict colony base, giving orders and eventually seeing them succumb to untold numbers of xenomorphs over their helmet cams. Salvaged [official site] is that idea extracted and put into a videogame. You play a commander who controls and observes AI soldiers as they sweep…

Pity me. I have two different VR headsets in my house, so my PC is a mess of cables, USB hubs and strained video output adaptors. My suffering is unimaginable. I have swaddled myself in wires and made my forehead sweat for your benefit, however: to try and give you some sense of how the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive compare to each other in…

The Oculus Rift is here. Not on a showfloor for a brief demonstration, but in our homes, where I've been able to play with it for the past week. I've tried official games, apps and movies, and I've experimented with some of the unofficial software available, and I'm ready to answer questions. Want to know how easy it to use, whether it'll make you vom,…

Pip and Adam are out in the wilds of GDC, hunting the grounds of the convention centre and the streets around for the most interesting people and games in the world today. In one dark room, in an unassuming building on a busy street, they found a crowd of virtual worlds. This was the Oculus Rift Game Day, in which the VR devices were on…